Salvation in a nut shell

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (I John 2:15).

This is a vitally important New Testament commandment. John does not say: “Don’t love the world too much,” he says: “Don’t love the world at all!”

The word for “world” here is cosmos, referring to the world as an organized system. Paul also has warned against walking “according to the course of this world” (Ephesians 2:2). Satan himself is the one who has set its course, for “the whole world lieth in wickedness” (or “the wicked one”—I John 5:19).

The world, of course, does not love us! “I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you” (John 15:19). “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). And why does the world hate Christ? “Because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil” (John 7:7). Paul’s friend, Demas, was such a casualty: “For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica” (II Timothy 4:10).

Yet how diligently we work to acquire possessions in the world, learn to enjoy the pleasures of the world, and strive to attain high positions in the world system. “The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (I John 2:16). Instead, we should “overcome the world” (I John 5:4).

There is one important sense in which we should love the world: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16). When Christ prayed for us in the upper room, He said: “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Christ loved the world—not its possessions or its pleasures or its positions, but its people! We too must love them and seek to bring them back to their Creator/Savior, as Jesus did.